And in this corner we have Pro Tools 12...

Pro Tools 12 - The Blowback
 
Pro Tools 12 was announced at the NAMM show, but not many liked what they heard about. This applies to you even if you're not a Pro Tools user because of the influence it will have on all sectors of the audio software industry.
 
1. What's so new? In a nutshell, Pro Tools 12 will only be available via subscription. You can either go month to month at $29.95 per month or $299 per year, or get a "perpetual" license that allows you to purchase the software for $899. You also need a subscription for your hardware as well so that the software continues to work with it.
 
Here's the rub - If you stop paying your monthly subscription, the Pro Tools software will disappear from your computer. And a perpetual license is of little help since you still have to pay $899 per year to get any support or upgrades. Stop paying and the app remains on your computer, but no updates are available to you.
 
2. Large facilities aren't happy. The major film and television studios and large post houses that all run Pro Tools and Avid picture editors realize that it's going to cost them a lot more money every year to keep their systems running. Imaging if you have 200+ systems and you have to pay big dough every year just to keep working?
 
Plus there's an issue of putting anything in the cloud, which violates the Marvel standard for protecting film data. Kind of defeats the purpose of being tied to the cloud.
 
3. Musicians and producers aren't happy. It's going to cost more money per year and you're going to be tied at the hip with Avid closer than ever, which scares a lot of musicians. But most of all, there's no advantage to using Pro Tools 12 because there are no new features except for cloud collaboration, which is of limited use to most users.
 
4. Avid's not the only one headed to the cloud. Adobe was the pioneer of the subscription model, but this is new to audio. That said Cakewalk Sonar and Slate Digital are going that way too.
 
5. Will a new alternative emerge? Nuendo once made a lot of headway into the film and video post community until it was bought by Yamaha, who ignored that sector afterwards. It's a very powerful and capable system, and with great third-party IO hardware now widely available, don't be surprised to see Nuendo getting another close look. Of course, if Universal Audio ever bought or came out with a DAW, the discussion would probably be over.
 
Outlook: There's a lot more to this story than you read above, although there's not enough space to get into it here. However, if you're a Pro Tools user, you're going to see some changes in the next 12 months, either transferring to the subscription model, perhaps Avid backing down on some level to something easier to digest, or having to change to a new DAW app.
 
If you're not a Pro Tools user, expect your favorite DAW to at least test the subscription waters soon, especially if Avid is successful.

This is another advantage that Cake has over PT.
 
There will also be an impact to educational institutions, unless AVID is providing pricing advantages to them.  PT is used a lot because it is taught a lot (because it was used a lot due to its hardware functionality originally.)  So either the cost of that education is going to go up (likely) or educational institutions who are teaching general principle courses (i.e. not PT specific ones) will switch to more affordable solutions.  Which will eventually result in a shift in the marketplace.

Cake says they are not a subscription and you can keep the software after you pay for it. How is that like a subscription that is needed for continued use?

AT
Subscription means whatever the company wants it to mean.  A subscription should mean you get the product and keep it.  If you want the latest, you keep paying for it.  Like newspapers.  Or magazines.  If you stopped your subscription, SOS didn't send the bully boys to your house to clean out your bathroom reading stash.  You just didn't get any upgrades.
 
Adobe and Protools don't understand English, or get subscription confused with extortion ("That's an ugly word, and if you mention it again I'll have your legs broken." - Animal House).
 
Cakewalk can use a dictionary.  And is the reason so many of us got short-tempered with those that didn't.
 
@

 
Well said AT!

Yeah, just read that B. Owsinski newsletter and was coming here to correct a post I'd made recently. That's the clearest explanation I've read so far, and it has the merit of coming from a Pro Tools user, so it's not like he's on a mission to hype another DAW software.
 
I think AVID will back down. That's the only option I see for them, and for their own sake. 
 
I own 11 and really don't care for 12. The way I see it, my current DAW will remain as is until I upgrade my studio computer - no OS upgrade, no major software upgrade. Furthermore, I've just inherited a Command 8 control surface for Pro Tools, and I intend to use that thing for a while...
 
If I want to enhance what I got, I'll simply run it on a laptop and hook it up to the main machine. And I must say that for that, Cakewalk's own subscription model and pricing is a lot more tempting. If I can get over my aversion for Windows...
 

mixmkr
Once I boot up and I'm inside my DAW software, I never use Windows. (Wink) ;-)

Yeah, but it's the steps to get there and have that machine configured... 
 
The only maintenance I've done in the last 4 years was an occasional "verify disk" and "repair permission". As for optimizing my DAW, I right-click and disable WIFI when working. That's it.
 
No drivers download, no 3rd party utilities to install or remove, no registry edit, no BIOS to tweak. I can do all that stuff and did it for over 10 years, but I've gotten spoiled. :P 
 
But I'm seriously looking into running Sonar on a secondary machine, nevertheless.
 

I think when studios get stable they tend to avoid upgrading unless absolutely necessary.  it's a royal pain having to get all the kinks figured out after an upgrade, especially when the return is not that significant.  i run across plenty of studios using PT 10 and even 9 occasionally. This model will basically assure that newcomers to the game will have no choice but to indulge in every upgrade or be stuck with nothing. The upside of this to me that is that it gives other players that had a huge uphill climb to overcome the seemingly insurmountable  lead Avid has built over the years. Avid has been losing money in recent years and i am guessing that upgrade sales are not what they wish and newcomers are splitting their options. I think this is more of a push to make their core users be stuck with their choice perpetually.

dubdisciple
I think when studios get stable they tend to avoid upgrading unless absolutely necessary.  it's a royal pain having to get all the kinks figured out after an upgrade, especially when the return is not that significant.  i run across plenty of studios using PT 10 and even 9 occasionally. This model will basically assure that newcomers to the game will have no choice but to indulge in every upgrade or be stuck with nothing. The upside of this to me that is that it gives other players that had a huge uphill climb to overcome the seemingly insurmountable  lead Avid has built over the years. Avid has been losing money in recent years and i am guessing that upgrade sales are not what they wish and newcomers are splitting their options. I think this is more of a push to make their core users be stuck with their choice perpetually.

My wife's brother runs a small commercial studio - he's still running Pro Tools TDM 5 or 6 on a Mac G4. He's added a laptop to his rig in order to run things like Kontakt.
 
Me I'm glad I got the upgrade to the latest version at bargain price. I don't write in Pro Tools and as far as mixing is concerned, version 11 offers all that I need.
 

Having just been through the hysteria of Sonar's membership rollout in this forum, I find it mildly amusing to read what's going on in the Avid forums. Some users are up in arms and will never give Avid another penny, and the moderators are feverishly posting links to the FAQ and saying that "...Avid will have to prove that your reenlistment each year is worth it." Sound familiar? The one thing that is different is nobody is repeating endlessly "It is NOT a subscription," because, of course, it is.
 
Pro Tools holds a stronger market position than Sonar -- it's been around longer, it's taught in schools and it's used in commercial settings where $899 (plus specialized hardware) can more easily be amortized. So Avid is leveraging that position to bring in more money. That's what corporations do. Sonar, in my opinion, is much better software for songwriters and project studios, and I bet if you looked at sales you'd see those are the areas where Sonar is most popular. There's just not as much money floating around in that environment, so Cakewalk cannot be quite so brazen as Avid, but the principle's the same.

Guitar Center is on the way out also, from what I just read...

Dave Modisette
 
Yup, that's part of my dilemma.  The full time studio guys will take what I would view as an insignificant feature update like track freeze and justify paying $600.00 for it.  Their logic (and I have to admit that for them it is sound) is that if that little feature saves them a couple of bucks worth of time per day, it pays for itself in a year.  Eeek, I'm pretty much disarmed at that point.

When I was actually in the commercial studio biz in the 70s and 80s, I noticed the "what-the-market-will-bear" syndrome. In those days you could buy, for example, a 31-band stereo graphic equalizer with -10 RCA connectors for $200. The same unit with +4 XLRs was $600. Because it was "professional." Flash forward to 2015 and you can see Avid doing something similar with their software. They would argue that their product is "professional" and thus should cost more. I think the difference today is that that the Avid advantage is quite tenuous. All they have going, really, is that they are in widespread use. They hope that people will use their product because people are using their product. If they push their users too far, a lot of people will start to notice that a PCM audio file is pretty much the same whether you make it in Pro Tools or Reaper or Sonar, and someone will mention that the Emperor has no clothes, and then Avid will sell Pro Tools and go back to marketing video editors, where the budgets are in the tens of millions and who cares if the editing suite costs $200k?
 
So I'm sticking with Sonar.